ARTAS, is it the future of FUE?

[BlondHead]

I dont know if you are allowed post links but you can googel ARTAS, it looks like it might speed up FUE procedures and make it cheaper.

 

"ARTAS is an interactive, computer assisted system utilizing image-guided robotics to enhance the quality of hair follicle harvesting. Through its design and ease-of-use, ARTAS has the potential to solve most of the technical challenges inherent in the manual FUE technique. The System is operated under the direction of a physician"

 

I was wondering do any doctors know of it and thinking of investing in it for thier practice

[nemo.shark]

its 10 years too late, i already thought of a robot to do this and wondered why fue surgeons haven't been using a ultra sound/doppler/low level x-ray which would be cheaper than this machine, what i thought of was a robot laser system built in to the same extraction robot like this one seems to be, which precisely makes the thousands of recipient sights with a laser in seconds and gives you a computer illustration of how the hair would grow and in what direction so the patient can choose what sort of hair style they want it to grow in. its a shame really that things like this are coming out just now, they would be perfect in a few years of development and even a crap surgeon could give an amazing result with one of these things. but unfortunately for hair transplant surgeons the two receptors in hair follicles which switches them on and commands them to grow like they did when you were a child before puberty even in the presence of high dht have been discovered, so fingers crossed lets hope these surgeons that have made lots of money over the years disfiguring people legally and being paid for the privilege do not start investing their money in this new finding and turning it into something partially effective and expensive injections you need frequently like what is will be going on at the histogen discovery, makes me sick that these people are having an involvement in the very things that would put them out of business and earn them less money and you have got to ask yourself why that is???? anyway just to let you know peptide antagonist and agonists are the future of hair loss and a 100% cure!!! and peptides and signaling molecules are the future of medicine full stop!!!!! the discovery im taking about some of you may be aware of but im telling you now that both receptors have been found and pharmaceutical company's are currently looking for selective receptor antagonists to bind to them which will activate 100% of your hairs to grow like they once did when you were young!! peptides are the future! the surgeons time is truly over!

Edited April 22, 2011 by nemo.shark

[BlondHead]

Sounds interesting. But dont all these drugs require years of testing? Or has that testing been done?

[nemo.shark]

the patent on the one that works on mice has got less than 10 years left on patent i think, but i think they are trying to patent some thing to do with it involving these receptors and hair loss. the thing is yeah it takes ages to get through clinical trials and approved, but look whats happened with the melanotan and melanotan 2 peptides that make your skin get a tan and change your hair pigment, they are very similar there's patents on them. they were tested to work in mice and now you can get them on the net pretty much anywhere and they are totally the safest and most beneficial peptides ever created! hey we are made of them amino acids in those peptides they are what life its self was created from. they are a part of us and no one should own them or prevent us access to them, they should be free to all who needs and wants them as and when they want them, look at melanotan forums people wanted them NOW so there was a demand for it and enterprising individuals made it happen NOW and not NEVER which is what would have happened if the bureaucrats and money men got their dirty hands on them and made them partially effective so they can make more money selling you a diluted and more expensive version! them melanotan peptide could save millions of lives each year preventing skin cancer while possibly preventing degenerative brain disorders like alzheimer's and ms and parkinson's from there protective effects, yet they are not available officially! you have to ask why that is. there's more money made from developing a partly effective expensive treatments that you need take an expensive pill for every day, so these things never get to people who can benefit from them. its totally wrong!

Edited April 22, 2011 by nemo.shark

[Blake Bloxham]

Nemo,

 

I think you're overestimating some of these 'miracle cures' here:

 

First, the ARTAS machine is, well, just that - a machine. Literally, dozens upon dozens of automated follicular unit extraction devices have come out before this one. Each claims that it will completely standardized the process; make the most inexperienced hair transplant surgeon a FUE expert, etc, and each one seems to slowly fade away and leave us with the same conclusion: the outcome of a follicular unit extraction case (removing patient physiology from the picture) depends on the skill and experience of the surgeon, NOT the type of tool he or she utilizes.

 

Furthermore, one of the biggest complaints regarding the ARTAS machine is that, to my knowledge, it has nothing to do with making recipient sites or placing grafts, but is simply another way to extract grafts quicker (which has been shown, various times, to increase strain on grafts and greatly lower yields).

 

Additionally, I don't think the answer is to utilize x-rays (as a scientist, I'm sure you know how poorly most tissues show up on x-ray scans) or lasers that make a thousand recipients simultaneously, or give some standardized print out of how a patient should look.

 

Additionally, would you care to expand on your peptide theory? I've read research regarding peptides in the past, and I truthfully don't quite see how they are the answer (even though you state all life comes from them - interestingly enough, I've always heard that life arose from the evolution of self-replicating RNA).

 

Until then, I definitely think we should focus energy on utilizing proven, current methods and remain 'cautiously optimistic' toward future, very hypothetical therapies.

[nemo.shark]

future there's guys on other sights getting these peptides made up as we speak and experimenting on themselves, they are not waiting for the clearance. they want what happened with the melanotan tanning peptide situation to happen where it was released to press in a mouse model that a peptide called mt and mt2 caused pigmentation of skin (tanning) and it wasn't soon after that was made public people were getting them peps made up and injecting themselves with it and now its all over the Internet and you can get it anywhere, interestingly enough it looks like the same mouse model used for the mt & mt2 experiment that was used for this peptide that made the hair grow in the bald mice! so it looks an accurate model for follicular processes in humans so i would say this peptide looks extremely promising that its going to induce the same effect in humans just like the mt peptides have proven to do.

 

your question about life is funny, where did you think the dna & rna came from in the first place before it started to reproduce in cells? or what its made from? do you think rna & dna was present when the planet first formed and it was created in the big bang? or in the first giant stars that went supernova which is where all the heavy elements of matter excluding hydrogen and helium came from? amino acids are the building blocks of proteins which are the building blocks of everything biological, you me and everyone.

 

in terms of these technical things though yeah maybe xrays would not be a good idea but only really from a radiation point of view in terms of the patient, the digital imaging xray software currently available is capable of forming some very accurate soft tissue imaging, you only have to look at ct scans to see that and im sure you have heard of the new body scanners in airports, it is possible to have quite accurate images through xrays and if you look at the precession of robots that manufacture microprocessors then you will find they are extremely accurate at levels on an nanometer and atomic scale which is outside that of human capability's. so the technology exists to do this, but yeah i wouldn't like to the first person to have my fues taken out by one. but i would if its been proven, take a look at the new lasers in eye corrective surgery, i think in terms of making recipient sights with a robot laser would give total perfection and a level of accuracy unachievable by a human just like the ones in eye surgery.

[Blake Bloxham]

your question about life is funny, where did you think the dna & rna came from in the first place before it started to reproduce in cells? or what its made from? do you think rna & dna was present when the planet first formed and it was created in the big bang? or in the first giant stars that went supernova which is where all the heavy elements of matter excluding hydrogen and helium came from? amino acids are the building blocks of proteins which are the building blocks of everything biological, you me and everyone.

 

 

Self-replicating RNA would have been formed by nucleic acids, not peptides which would be forged from amino acids. Now, if you wanted to possibly discuss the composition of some sort of archaic catalyst acting as the first genetic transcription factor ... then that's a different story

 

There have been theories stating that early life could have formed from a peptide linked nucleic acid structure, but as of now, it's only been synthesized (with excessive outside sources) in a lab and is only suggested based on availability, not so much the feasibility of this model coming together above a structure assembled from nucleic acids.

 

However, I GREATLY digress and won't discuss this any further ...

 

My point with the ARTAS, is that the idea of machines completely automating the FUE process has been pushed many times before, and each time it seems to create a lot of buzz about 'changing the industry' and then simply fade away. As I said before, the only conclusion hair restoration patients are left with time-and-time again is that the longevity of FUE surgery lies in the practitioners, not the tools.

[nemo.shark]

future if you want to know how life began look into the experiments done that replicated the early atmospheric conditions of the earth, they found that it was electricity from lightning that created amino acids on earth and they then formed proteins which formed other structures, but there's also another theory called panspermia where asteroids or comments seeded the earth with the amino acids, which was compounded with the recent discovery of the existence of the amino acid glycine in deep space through its detection with radio telescopes. these two theory's are what Steven Hawkins advocates. maybe it was a combination of these two phenomena??